


What's Tater? Precious

by SecretGeniusShittyKnight (augopher)



Series: Fellowship of the Rink [1]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Anxiety, Brotp: Jack & Tater, Fluff and Feels, M/M, Tater is big softie, Tater is secret nerd who loves Lord of the Rings, Unplanned coming out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-28
Updated: 2016-04-28
Packaged: 2018-06-05 03:11:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6686800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/augopher/pseuds/SecretGeniusShittyKnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tater walks in, accidentally interrupting one of Jack and Bitty's Skype calls. His response is much better than Jack expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What's Tater? Precious

**Author's Note:**

> All characters except Tuukka 'Fancy Rantsy' Rantanen are the creation of Ngozi Ukazu in her wonderful comic [Check, Please!](http://omgcheckplease.tumblr.com/)

 

 

Crammed alongside too many of his teammates inside the elevator of their hotel in Dallas, Jack focused on his breathing. He wasn’t claustrophobic, not usually, but there was something about the stale air exhaled by thirteen people on their ride up seventeen stories that had a way of becoming suffocating real quick. Still keyed up from their win against the Stars, he felt a crackle of energy, a bit like a charge of static electricity, buzzing through his veins, bouncing around inside his chest, his stomach, his head.

See anxiety wasn’t only about feeling afraid, often irrational, but there was this side to it where everything became overwhelming. Too much noise, too much light and movement, too much contact…

Just too much.

And that was precisely the state in which he currently found himself amidst a cacophony of voices, words in accents as varied as the personalities of the people that spoke them. The competing smells of Thirdy’s aftershave, Snowy’s cologne that he’d laid on real heavy, and the peppermint of Guy’s chapstick that the man swore by flooded Jack’s nostrils. You know the perfume counters in department stores? How you walked in and the scent of everything came at you at once? Yeah, Jack felt like he had all those times his mother had dragged him shopping at Ogilvy’s. But the worst thing about right now was the lack of breathing room.

If only he had the smooth plane of the elevator wall at his back. Maybe then he wouldn’t feel like he wanted to claw his skin off. No such luck though, as he found himself surrounded by the bodies of almost half his team pressed up against him. So there he stood, shoulder-to-shoulder with Marty and Rantsy. Through the thin fabric of his dress shirt, he could feel the coarseness of Rantsy’s wool suit jacket. Fancy Rantsy, they sometimes called him, and it had nothing to do with his elegant passing. Any other day, Jack would appreciate the man’s dedication to looking as Shitty had called him, ‘One Slick Motherfucker’. But today, Jack wanted to rip the sport-coat and its offending fabric off the guy’s back.

As he stood there, shaking, imperceptible amidst the sardine-can-packed throng of bodies, he wondered if he focused really hard, he could manage to vibrate his consciousness right the fuck out of him, leaving his body standing there like the robotic form the Haus guys like to chirp him about.

When the elevator dinged, signalling their arrival on the seventeenth floor, Jack could not flee the elevator fast enough.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, just a bit stuffy in there, Guy.” He shouldered his bag as he continued down the hall, white-knuckling his keycard, Tater trailing close behind him.

“So, Zimmboni,” Tater started, hanging his jacket in the closet, “I go watch movie in Snowy’s room. He bring my favorite, Lord of Rings trilogy this roadie. You come too?”

Jack shrugged off Tater’s earnest attempt to get him to socialize. “No thanks. I think I’m just going to hang out in here tonight.”

Tater eyed him for a moment before smirking. “Okay I got you. You need call your girl.” He gave Jack’s shoulder a playful shove. “As Fancy say, Don’t do thing he won’t do.”

Jack managed a weak chuckle at Tater’s attempt at encouragement and watched him leave the room. From his suitcase in the corner, he pulled out his laptop and fired up Skype.

The little icon blinking on the screen as he waited for his call to connect felt like it was mocking him, taking longer than usual to begin ringing. Yet, between the space of one breath and the next, Bitty’s ray of sunshine smile filled the screen.

“Hi, honey. That was a great goal in the second. I’m so proud of you.”

“Yeah, I guess it was,” Jack said, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Sweetheart, what’s the matter?”

“Just one of those days, you know?”

He watched Bitty’s smile turn down into a tiny frown. “Anything I can do to help?”

“No, I mean- Just talking to you helps. Tell me about your day.”

“Well, you will never believe what Tango asked today? Someone brought up board games, which lead to a three hour rant from Holster about how you cheated at Catan.”

“I am outraged. I did not cheat. Holster didn’t understand the rules.”

“There. That got a smile out of you.”

Bitty continued on recounting his day, and Jack felt his anxiety beginning to subside, ebbing out of him as though it were low tide. Felt nice. Halfway through his explanation about how they started a unit on molecular gastronomy in his food science class-which Bitty described as absolute blasphemy-the door to his hotel room opened drawing Jack’s attention away from the story. However, Bitty was so engrossed in the conversation, he hadn’t noticed.

So, as the words and the occasional pet name flowed from Bitty’s lips in a voice that was very much _not_ a woman’s, Jack stared wide-eyed at Tater’s face, a face that had confusion painted all over it. He could practically see the wheels in Tater’s head spinning as they tried to catch up, and he was able to pinpoint the exact moment the pieces all fell into place. Then, Tater’s face did something else entirely. It looked almost...guilty.

Jack swallowed hard, before turning his attention back to the screen to halt Bitty’s words.

“What’s the matter, honey? Why do you look like you’ve seen one the Haus ghosts?”

He licked his lips. “Forget your phone again, Tater?”

Instead of answering him, Tater sat down on his bed and faced him, angling his body so he could get a view of the screen. “So...Zimmboni, I think I make mistake, yeah? This girl of yours, is not girl, but cute, small, blonde boy. Why you not say anything? I say wrong thing on camera so many times.”

“I wasn’t ready to tell anyone. I’m still not.”

Tater took a deep breath and stood, walking into view of the webcam on Jack’s laptop. “Hi, I’m Tater, or Alexei...my mamochka calls me Lyosha. Your choice.”

“I’m Eric. The guys call me Bittle.”

“So, Beetle. You Zimmboni’s boyfriend?”

Bitty gave him a nervous chuckle. “Yes….”

“You good cook. Make good pies.” He turned to Jack as he sat back down on the edge of his bed. “So, you know why I come to America to play hockey?”

Jack shook his head.

“Is not for money. In Russia, is not safe for people like you, like Beetle. Not because people but government is...they not understand. Old-fashioned. Rigid. Well some people, my parents, still that way. That makes dangerous for my sister. She like you.” Jack watched Tater wring his hands in his lap. “It my dream to bring Irishka here. She live with me, be safer, be herself. But...she still baby, only sixteen, and papers take long time to get...So what I say is, you,” he pointed first to Jack and then to the laptop screen where Bitty looked on, hanging on Tater’s every word, “and Beetle, you safe with me. I be ally, yeah? You be my small, Canadian brother.” He covered his heart with his hand. “I protect you. Someone say bad thing about Zimmboni, they deal with Tater,” he said, pointing to himself.

He stood and patted Jack on the shoulder. “It nice to meet you, Beetle. I can’t cook, but you try and make [sharlotka](http://www.olgasflavorfactory.com/weeknight-dinners/sharlotka-russian-apple-piecake/) for me sometime? I buy ingredients, maybe you show me how cook?”

Bitty smiled. “Nice to meet you too, Tater. I think we could do that.”

“Now, I leave you alone, Zimmboni. When you finished talking you come to bar, I buy you drink. Your choice. Sorry I not knock before.” He didn’t give Jack a chance to reply and walked for the door. Fingers wrapped around the handle, he stopped and turned around. “So...when I talk about Bitty from now on...what should I say? I don’t want to say wrong thing anymore, but want to keep secret.”

“I guess you could call him my...sweetheart.”

Tater. “Sweetheart. That. I will do that.”

As the door shut behind him, Jack sat alone in his room once more. “Well, that was not how I expected that to go.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you really going to teach him to cook? Because let me tell you, Bits...he’s really bad at it.”

Bitty’s full-bodied laugh filled the cavernous empty spaces in Jack’s hotel room. “Looky here, Mr. Zimmerman, I won’t have your sass. I’ll have you know, I am up to the challenge.”

“I bet you are.”

 

***

 

“Hey, Zimmboni!” Tater called out as Jack walked into the hotel bar. “I think for a while, you might not show. Come, sit. Order drink.”

Jack picked a beer on tap and sat, unsure of what to say while they waited for their drinks to arrive. One thing, however, stuck in his mind quite clearly. “I want to thank you for you know...what you said in there. I’ve spent so long afraid about what would happen if I told people.”

Tater sighed. “Look. I play on many teams so far, and they say bad things about men like you in locker room. But, Falconers, they good men. I hear none of that. Thirdy has older brother. He and husband adopt two girls last year. All Falconers like them. His brother is very funny man. So what I say is, your secret safe with me. But team has your back if you want.” He took a sip from his drink. “You Falconer now, right? You can play. All that matter. Now hurry, finish drink. I want to go finish movie before Rantsy fall asleep and start snoring. He ruin all movies. All the time, snoring.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Come stop by my new [Check, Please!](http://secretgeniusshittyknight.tumblr.com/) blog or visit my [main blog](http://captaintinymite.tumblr.com/)


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